German scientists have discovered a strategy for removing amyloid plaques — newly forming clumps in a brain with Alzheimer’s disease that are created by misfolded proteins that clump together and damage nerve cells.
The scientists from the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) in Munich and the Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU) Munich took aged microglia cells (the scavenger cells of the brain’s… read more
By interfacing brain cells with graphene, University of Illinois at Chicago researchers have differentiated a single hyperactive Glioblastoma Multiforme cancerous astrocyte cell from a normal cell in the lab — pointing the way to developing a simple, noninvasive tool for early cancer diagnosis.
In the study, reported in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, the researchers looked at lab-cultured human brain astrocyte cells taken from a… read more
Harvard researchers have developed a method for automatically designing actuators that enable fingers and knees in a soft robot to move more organically, a robot arm to move more smoothly along a path, or a wearable robot or exoskeleton to help a patient move a limb more naturally.
Designing such actuators is currently a complex design challenge, requiring a sequence of actuator segments, each performing a different motion. “Rather… read more
Salk Institute scientists have extended the average lifespan of live mice by 30 percent, according to a study published December 15 in Cell. They did that by rolling back the “aging clock” to younger years, using cellular reprogramming.
The finding suggests that aging is reversible by winding back an animal’s biological clock to a more youthful state and that lifespan can be extended. While the research does not yet apply… read more
A team of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School investigators has identified a pathway that appears to underlie the apparent ability of the diabetes drug metformin to both block the growth of human cancer cells and extend the lifespan of the C.elegans roundworm.
That finding implies that this single genetic pathway may play an important role in a wide range of organisms — including humans.
“We… read more
Cornell University engineers have invented a new kind of robotic hand with a human’s delicate sense of touch.
Scenario: you lost part of your arm in a car accident. That artificial arm and hand you got from the hospital lets you feel and pick up things — even type on a keyboard. But not with the same sensitivity as a real hand. Now, an artificial prosthesis can… read more
Researchers at the University of Minnesota have achieved a “major breakthrough” that allows people to control a robotic arm in three dimensions, using only their minds. The research has the potential to help millions of people who are paralyzed or have neurodegenerative diseases.
The open-access study is published online today in Scientific Reports, a Nature research journal.
College of Science and Engineering, UMN | Noninvasive EEG-based control of a robotic… read more
While they have a speech-ready vocal tract, primates can’t speak because they lack a speech-ready brain, contrary to widespread opinion that they are limited by anatomy, researchers at Princeton University and associates have reported Dec. 9 in the open-access journal Science Advances.
The researchers reached this conclusion by first recording X-ray videos showing the movements of the different parts of a macaque’s vocal anatomy — such as the tongue,… read more
In a three-year study of a severely brain-injured woman’s remarkable recovery, doctors measured aspects of brain structure and function before and after recovering communication, a first — raising the question: could other minimally responsive or unresponsive chronic-care patients also regain organized, higher-level brain function?
Challenging what neurologists thought was possible, the pioneering study by Weill Cornell Medicine scientists was published Dec. 7 in Science Translational Medicine.
It… read more
President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team is considering libertarian Silicon Valley investor Jim O’Neill, a Peter Thiel associate, to head the Food and Drug Administration, Bloomberg Politics has reported.
O’Neill, the Managing Director of Mithril Capital Management LLC, doesn’t have a medical background, but served in the George W. Bush administration as principal associate deputy secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services.… read more
MIT researchers have designed a new machine-learning system that can learn by itself to extract text information for statistical analysis when available data is scarce.
This new “information extraction” system turns machine learning on its head. It works like humans do. When we run out of data in a study (say, differentiating between fake and real news), we simply search the Internet for more data, and then… read more
A new drug-delivery system based on an tiny implantable capsule could “revolutionize” the delivery of medicine to treat cancer and a host of other diseases and ailments, according to researchers at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA).
“The problem with most drug-delivery systems is that you have a specific minimum dosage of medicine that you need to take for it to be effective,” said… read more
Disney Research has developed a 360-degree virtual-reality app that enables users to enhance their experience by adding customized haptic (body sensations) effects that can be triggered by user movements, biofeedback, or timelines.
A team led by Ali Israr, senior research engineer at Disney Research, has demonstrated the haptic plugin using a unique chair to provide full body sensations and a library of “feel… read more
Using ultrasound to bypass the blood-brain barrier (BBB), Columbia University researchers have succeeded in releasing drugs only in the specific area of the brain where they are needed — not in the rest of the body. The goal is to help treat Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and other neurodegenerative diseases without collateral damage.
The BBB is an impassable obstacle for 98% of drugs, which it treats as pathogens and… read more
A new kind of bioluminescent sensor developed by Vanderbilt scientists causes individual brain cells to glow in the dark, giving neuroscientists a new tool to track what’s happening in large neural networks in the brain.
The sensor is a genetically modified form of luciferase, the enzyme that fireflies and other species use to produce light.
Traditional electrical techniques for recording the activity of neurons are limited… read more